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June 30, 2009

FrameMaker: Making comments stand out

Consider this scenario: you're working in a FrameMaker document that uses a lot of conditional tags, including the conditional tag defined for comments and editorial notes. If you need to work on incorporating comments, you can display all the conditional content in the document with the condition indicators visible. However, browsing your way through the multi-colored text to look for comments may be difficult.

Before.jpg

A simple workaround here could be applying a character tag to the comments and editorial notes in addition to the conditional formatting. This way, even when the condition indicators are hidden, the comments and editorial notes in the document stand out from the rest of the content.

The screenshot below illustrates the character tag Comment-text applied to editorial notes.

After.jpg


Further reading

If you need help creating a new character tag in FrameMaker, refer to "Character Formats" in FrameMaker web Help. To understand how to apply and manage conditional tags, see "Working in conditional documents".

June 22, 2009

DITA specialization in FrameMaker 9

DITA Specialization lets you define new information classifications that can be structural or a new domain specification. Structural specialization in DITA lets you define new topic or map structures derived from base topics and maps, such as concept, task, or reference whereas domain specialization in DITA lets you define markup for a specific information domain or subject area, such as programming or hardware.

Click here for step by step instructions on how to create specialized DITA DTDs, derive EDDs for use in FrameMaker, create a complete structured application, and use the specialized DITA DTDs to author content in FrameMaker.